Rackspace hopes to make it easier to use its OpenStack private cloud offering by partnering with Redapt, a company that procures, configures and ships servers to customers.

Redapt will configure and ship hardware to Rackspace customers building private OpenStack clouds

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Rackspace hopes to make it easier to use its OpenStack private cloud offering by partnering with Redapt, a company that procures, configures and ships servers to customers.

"One challenge we have is how to handle the physical setup in [the customer's] environment," said Jim Curry, general manager for Rackspace Cloud Builders. "This is what Redapt is an expert at."

Rackspace said earlier this year that it would offer its support services for private OpenStack cloud environments that businesses build in-house or in a collocation environment. To take advantage of the support offering, businesses must use Dell C series servers and a reference architecture released by Rackspace. Rackspace plans to support other server hardware in the future.

But it's found that getting hardware into a data center for customers -- whether on-premise or in a collocation environment -- is a bit of a hurdle. Rackspace isn't in the business of configuring and shipping hardware and doesn't want to be, Curry said.

Redapt, however, procures hardware and even configures it in racks, and then ships the products to customers. It also handles hardware failures, replacing hard drives that die, for instance.

Customers were asking Rackspace for help with getting the hardware to their locations and so the company is bringing in Redapt to help.

There is a growing interest in building private clouds based on OpenStack. Businesses that don't go with Rackspace's offer can try Piston and Nebula, two other companies offering products for building private OpenStack clouds.